


not one will know of the war

by 8611



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: 00Q - Freeform, Artificial Intelligence, M/M, Science Fiction, Sorta character death, lack of happy, or foggy if you're in London, the future is bleak and always rainy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-23
Updated: 2012-11-23
Packaged: 2017-11-19 08:41:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Its name is Q, and its avatar is a thin young man with large glasses and messy hair, rendered in clear, bright blue lines that make him burn against the background of the real world. He sits at the edge of Bond’s vision, and as long as Bond has his connections open, Q is there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not one will know of the war

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't tag it as such because it's not quite what's going on, but there is sorta-ish character death in this. Sorta kinda. 
> 
> The title is from the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale.

It is a habit of 00s to not last especially long. In this respect, they’re excellent for testing field tech, because if something goes rogue or blows up, no one is really surprised about the sudden need for a new 00. It’s an expense write-off. 

Bond has all the right qualities – a certain disregard for human life, excellent manipulation abilities, brilliant aim, and twisted morals that would show up somewhat like kudzu, if anyone every tried to diagram them. 

Bond, in a word, is the perfect 00. Because of this and his peers’ high turnover rate, he’s given the latest in AI tech when he’s allowed his new status. This one has emotions (or, commands and programs made to look like emotions) and R&D is a little bit worried about this fact, although not enough that it stops them from installing it at the base of Bond’s skull and sending him out to destroy people.

Its name is Q, and its avatar is a thin young man with large glasses and messy hair, rendered in clear, bright blue lines that make him burn against the background of the real world. He sits at the edge of Bond’s vision, and as long as Bond has his connections open, Q is there. 

Bond is a blunt instrument. Q is probably the most advanced piece of technology ever produced on this planet or any other. But Bond is human, and Q is not. 

\---

It is strange for Bond, this new intrusion in his head. He’s grown up around all of this technology, and yet he’s shied away from it his whole life. He feels much more like a person when he’s off the grid, instead of a single red dot on a grid that covers the world. 

But Q is always there, even when Bond turns his connections off. Q will ghost at the back of his mind in those instances, and Bond will get the distinct impression that he’s tut-ing at Bond’s inability to follow directions.

Q is there for his third kill. Q is there for blood and brains and sweat and rope burn (the sear of it on Bond’s hand as it slips from his fingers), there for women and men, there for scathing comments and dry retorts and, when Bond needs it most, blissful silence when Q will even remove his avatar from Bond’s vision. 

Q is there for his arguments with M, his dealings with criminals and crooks and sociopaths. 

(Q is there for Vesper, dress and hair and skin beautiful in the strange blue of the water.)

For a long time after Venice, Q is silent, curled up at the base of Bond’s skull, and he doesn’t give him any direction or data or suggestions, because he is there for Mr. White and that situation went exactly like he wanted it to anyway. 

Q is not human, but Bond’s mind is teaching him things. 

\---

Q figures out that he can project himself onto mirrors through Bond’s vision on a quiet morning. Bond is splashing water on his face, and Q is suddenly there when he looks up. This is how his bathroom mirror ends up with a bullet in it, right where the forehead of Q’s fake reflection was. 

The shards fall to the counter and floor, making sharp, clean noises, breaking into ever more pieces each time one hits the floor. The pieces reflect the bathroom in fractures and webs, and Bond knows there is glass everywhere that he’ll step, that it will be hell to clean up. 

(The bullet embedded into the mirror backing doesn’t help.)

Q has placed his avatar back in the edge of Bond’s vision, and is sitting cross-legged, head down and totally engrossed with whatever he’s furiously doing on his laptop. 

“What was that?” Bond growls, staring at his torso in the corner of the mirror that’s left. 

“Nothing,” Q says. 

“It didn’t look like nothing,” Bond says, but Q doesn’t respond, and Bond feels like the AI is withdrawal for the rest of the day, as if that’s even possible. He seems to stand out less, there’s less light in the lines of his avatar, it’s muted somehow. 

Bond spends time he could be using for other useful pursuits instead cleaning up his bathroom mirror, the wireframe in his vision helpfully pointing out where every last little shard and piece had gotten to, scattered across the tile. 

“You shot me,” Q says hours and hours later, when Bond is in bed (sleepless, like always, staring out his bedroom window at the lights of the city with readouts clicking by, local news items, traffic reports). 

“I shot the mirror,” Bond says. 

“Yes, but you shot at me, in the mirror,” Q says, and he sounds honestly angry about it. “Do you not trust me?”

“I don’t trust people suddenly showing up in my mirror,” Bond says, and Q is silent after that for a while, and Bond falls asleep to the sounds of the city and nothing else. 

\---

Q is elegantly useful, when there’s a gun in Bond’s hand, or when he’s running across a city, or trying to get information out of someone. 

(Wind speeds, cross streets, soft parts.)

When he’s not on the job, Q is snarky and conversational, and Bond feels that he should be annoyed that Q is always there, but he’s not. 

When he’s asleep, he starts to dream. Not at first, not for the first few months that Q is in his head, but after that, he starts seeing the young man from the mirror in the swirls of REM state. 

(Q is laughing at something Bond has done as they move through a park, and there’s mist and the trees are missing their leaves and Q’s scarf matches his socks. Q is in a cemetery in a black pea coat and there are cobblestones and swirling fall colors on the pathways, and when he looks up his eyes are dry, and Bond can’t read the name on the memorial. Q is technicolor perfect in the lights of a club in Soho that Bond hasn’t been to in years and years, his hands over his head, his glasses gone, his body moving like it could never move if it was made out of blue lines and light. 

Q is arching under his hands, back a perfect arch and breath coming in short gasps punctuated with gasps that sound like Bond’s name, maybe.)

He wakes up agitated and jumpy, skin too tight and too warm, and wonders if these are false memories of Q’s or something more real, something that his subconscious has produced without a single digital element, without help from Q. 

He’s on the range at the Vauxhall Cross building, testing new handgun prototypes, when he finally asks Q about it. 

“Did they give you memories?” The sharp bang of the gun goes off, Bond pulling the trigger as he breathes out on _memories_. 

“No, they thought I’d figure out that they were false and go crazy,” Q says. “I don’t like the recoil on this gun.”

“It’s weighted oddly,” Bond agrees. His readouts show that despite strange weight or bad recoil, he’d still hit the target dead center. Data springs up, quick readouts on the gun. They mean much more to Q than Bond. Bond’s assessment of weapons will always be fully based in the real world, in gravity and force and velocity and how they adapt to and act in his hands. 

“Why the memories question?” Q asks when Bond is testing the next gun down the line. 

“Just a question,” Bond says, and they leave it at that.

\---

The second time Q tries the mirror trick, it’s on the wrong side of midnight and Bond is staring at the lines etched into his face in the mirror. There’s a tumbler of whiskey on the edge of the vanity that Bond hasn’t touched since he walked in here ten minutes prior. 

Bond blinks and Q is suddenly there, and he can feel his whole body go on alert, hand going for the gun he keeps under the shelves. 

“It’s me,” Q says in a rush, and Bond freezes. For a second neither of them moves, and then Bond slowly lets the tension out of his shoulders, keeping his eyes on Q the whole time. 

Q has given himself a body that’s skinny and gazelle like with length in his limbs and neck, and his hair stands up just a bit too much, his skin is just a tad too even. Bond only notices the little perfect imperfections because he looks for them, looks for things that will assure him that Q isn’t real, and isn’t here in the room with him. 

Bond is also aware that he wants to reach out and touch Q, and when he turns to look at where Q should be, standing next to Bond, there is nothing but empty air. He’s just as alone as he was two minutes ago. 

“Quite the trick you’ve learned,” Bond says dryly, and then reaches for the tumbler. The rest of the whiskey burns down his throat like smoke. 

“Is it alright?” Q asks, and he worries at his bottom lip, making red lips even redder, and Bond watches his mouth. 

“I don’t know,” Bond says honestly, and takes one last long hard look at Q before he licks his lips (they’re dry, cracked) and turns, leaving Q alone in the mirror. 

Bond isn’t sure if he’s relieved or unsettled when Q slides back in the corner of his vision in his avatar form. 

That night, he dreams of reaching forward, through the mirror (the glass splinters, breaking on the floor again like rain and ice) and touching Q, and his skin is warm and smooth under Bond’s rough palms. 

\---

Bond kills the man with a metal pole to the head because it’s all he has on him in this place, and then drops the body via a metal chain and hook sliced up into his skull. The body dangles a floor down, and Bond watches it swing, head misshapen and strange. 

Bond doesn’t care, because the man had tried to cut into Bond’s skull at the exact same place, and as far as Bond was concerned, Q wasn’t going anywhere. Q was his. 

“Poetic,” Q notes dryly. “Two of the guards are still alive.”

“I don’t like poetry,” Bond says, and turns around to rope the two living guards together, leaving them in that warehouse to do with their lives as they see fit. He collects the DNA drives that this man had stolen (or had paid someone to steal for him), the drives that have Q’s basic programming and information them, although they don’t have his higher level commands or, more importantly, Q’s hardware. 

(The most advanced AI in the world only has one set of hardware, and it’s wired into Bond’s brain stem.)

“You’re loosing blood,” Q notes after Bond has limped out into the snowy German industrial park, and he stops in the yellow pool of light formed by a street lamp. “I don’t see any – oh. Oh, Bond, you need to seek medical attention.”

“I’m fine,” Bond says, even though he’s pretty sure something in his leg is damaged. He can walk, so he assumes it must be his fibula. He’s broken it before, it’s fine. Anything else that’s wrong is masked by the anger and adrenaline slamming through his body. 

“No, you’re not,” Q says, and there’s something in his voice that Bond tries not to identify because it sounds like fear. “You’re bleeding into your brain and thoracic cavity. Your intracranial pressure is _much_ too high already, how are you even still standing up –“

“I do have a bit of a headache,” Bond notes, and then feels the world tilt in a strange way, on an unknown axis, and lights pops in his head, the pain sudden and like an axe driven through his forehead. 

He is aware that Q is saying something, his voice fast and repetitive and frantic, but all he can see are the drives scattered in the snow, and he thinks, foggily, _hope that doesn’t cause any water damage_. 

His vitals are screaming across his vision, angry and red, and then he closes his eyes. 

\---

(It’s November and they’re in the Heath and it’s one of those mornings where the fog is thick on the ground and in the air. It makes the trees, most of them missing all their leaves, seem even more knarred, dark limps reaching out and vanishing into the heavy fog.

The leaves form a thick carpet on the ground, plastered over the wet grass and gravel, and Q laughs when Bond nearly slips on an especially wet patch. 

“The great 007, nearly brought to his knees by some weather and leaves,” Q says, smiling. Bond narrows his eyes a bit, but lets it go. He tucks his hands into his pockets and doesn’t stop Q when he links their arms together and leads him forward. 

It’s October and they’re in Père Lachaise and the leaves have started falling. They’re spreading yellow and brown and red across the cobblestones, tucked up between monuments where the wind has left them. Bond is here for an assignment, technically, but right now he’s trailing a man who had stopped at the crematory, and so they’d wandered. By Bond’s guessing, he’d probably be there around an hour, which gave them an hour to explore. 

Q stops at Édouard Branly’s grave, a strange triangular affair that stands out from the more traditional monuments and mausoleums on either side of it. 

“Pioneer in wireless technology,” Q says. 

“Are you going to give me a lecture like that time at the Tesla museum?” Bond asks, raising an eyebrow. Q grins at him, but shakes his head. 

“No, you’ll read up on it if you want to,” Q says, and Bond wonders how Q knows him that well, knows very well that Bond won’t look Branly up because it’s not information he needs. 

The leaves make a crisp sound as they cartwheel across the ground, and Q’s grin softens to something simpler. The corners of Bond’s lips twitch up, and he’s sure there’s warmth in his eyes that isn’t normally there. 

It’s September and they’re at Club 49, because Bond hasn’t been here in years and hates it but Q and Eve had insisted, and he’d been all but dragged away from his desk by the two. Q had eventually gotten up to dance, his usual dry primness stripped away for something more devious, more fluid. The lighting plays with his pale skin, turning it blue, and red, and then purple, before the green strobes catch his hair. 

He dances with his hips and his arms are above his head, and Bond knows that he shouldn’t, but somehow he ends up in Q’s space, hands on those hips, and Q doesn’t stop him. He lets him in, and he lets him dance, and when Bond presses his lips to the juncture of Q’s neck and shoulder, that’s allowed to happen too. 

Q’s lips are warm and buzzing and he kisses back like a storm.)

\---

Bond wakes up with half of his head shaved and problems with his coordination. He wakes up with a repaired leg (it was just his fibula, he was right) and an order to accept paid leave for at least 3 months, and an order for physical therapy, and a cautious suggestion that he might be allowed back to a desk job. He’s been put out to pasture. 

More importantly, Bond wakes up without Q, and a new cut at the base of his skull that used to be a scar. 

Bond wakes up and wants to go back to sleep, in that strange in between space where Q wore scarves that matched his socks and paid respects at scientist’s graves and could dance in the technicolor lights. 

That in between space where Q’s lips had been perfect, and Bond could image a lazy morning with Q stretched out under his hands, body pale and lithe and spine arched and Bond’s name spilling from his lips like whiskey smoke.


End file.
